The purpose of this book is to introduce a wide range of readers – from the professional programmer to the computer science student – to the rich world of functional programming using the F# programming language. The book is intended as the textbook in a course on functional programming and aims at showing the role of functional programming in a wide spectrum of applications ranging from computer science examples over database examples to systems that engage in a dialogue with a user.

Why functional programming u sing F#?

Functional programming languages have existed in academia for more than a quarter of a century, starting with the untyped Lisp language, followed by strongly typed languages like Haskell and Standard ML.

The penetration of functional languages to the software industry has, nevertheless, been surprisingly slow. The reason is probably lack of support of functional languages by commercial software development platforms, and software development managers are reluctant to base software development on languages living in a non-commercial environment.

This state of affairs has been changed completely by the appearance of F#, an open-source, full-blown functional language integrated in the Visual Studio development platform and with access to all features in the .NET program library.